Finding Your Swoosh

An entrepreneur could never design a logo as effective as Starbucks.

I’ve always said that a logo can make or break a business.

More specifically: finding a visual identity which deeply resonates with your audience can help your product immensely. By contrast, if your visual identity is jarring to your audience, it can seriously set you back.

A piece of advice given by Seth Godin is that logos are “just a placeholder, a label waiting to earn some meaning”. He stresses that your brand is what matters – and he’s right. However, where he and I disagree is on how much influence the visual representation of your brand has.

There’s a reason that companies like Apple and Nike spent tens of thousands of dollars on their logo. To the lay person, a swoosh or a half-eaten apple may seem simple, but a lot of research and iteration goes into fine-tuning their reverberative quality.

The work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Max Braun may seem simple, but it takes a lot of talent and experience to boil something down to its barest essential. As Clare Boothe Luce is famous for saying, Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

A layperson could never architect a building as simple as Farnsworth House. A bootstrapping entrepreneur could never design a logo as effective as Starbucks.

What is your area of expertise? If you were to outsource your visual identity, where could your talent and experience be focused?